La Souriante Madame Beudet (1923)
Directed by Germaine Dulac

Film Review

Germaine Dulac had made a dozen films (mostly now lost or forgotten) before she directed one of the two cinematic marvels for which is now justly remembered - La Souriante Madame Beudet (a.k.a. The Smiling Madame Beudet).  In contrast to her subsequent surreal masterpiece, La Coquille et le clergyman (1928), this film has a stark reality to it and powerfully expresses the ennui and sense of confinement experienced by most members of Dulac's sex at the time it was made.  A staunch feminist, Dulac was highly attuned to the raw deal that women had in a male-oriented society (in France, women were not allowed to vote in national elections before 1944) and she became a standard bearer for the modern liberated women by pursing an active career in an industry that was almost exclusively the preserve of the male sex.  In her most overtly feminist film, Dulac provides a grimly comedic evocation of the despair of a woman shackled to a life of grudging servitude through the bonds of marriage and social convention.

Dulac's approach is an example of impressionism, a style of cinema developed by Dulac and her French avant-garde contemporaries that relies more on framings, camera effects and angles than mise-en-scène to express visually the mental states of the characters.  It is a form of subjective cinema that differs subtly from expressionism, which achieves a similar effect through set design, lighting, acting style and shot composition.  The most apparent examples of impressionistic technique in Dulac's film include the use of slow motion and lens distortion in the sequence where Madame Beudet's husband appears to her in a dream-like flight of fancy and threatens her with lascivious intent.  Earlier in the film, the heroine imagines a tennis player attacking her husband and dragging him off - this is realised using superimposition, a device often used by the French impressionist filmmakers (notably Abel Gance).  These impressionistic touches not only add to the film's distinctive poetry, they also stress the intense antagonism that Madame Beudet feels for her husband and her almost psychotic yearning to be rid of him.

Some moody lighting blurs the boundary between imagined fantasy and the nightmare reality that overtakes Madame Beudet as she loads the gun with bullets that she knows will shatter her husband's brain.  At the end of the film, once the drama has resolved itself, a puppet show is projected onto a wall as a glib parody of a happy marriage, and we realise that this is how Madame Beudet sees herself - a pathetic guignol forever condemned to enact a ritual of simulated contentment in a theatre for children.  In any other film, the very last shot would have implied "And they lived happily ever after" but here it says the complete opposite.  The smile of Madame Beudet is not that of a fulfilled woman but rather that we would expect to see on the face of a condemned man.

Film Synopsis

Madame Beudet leads a melancholic and unfulfilled life, trapped in a loveless marriage to a draper who neglects and subjugates her.  She has grown weary of her husband's childish stunts, such as threatening to shoot himself in the head with an unloaded revolver, and she yearns to be set free and start a new life before it is too late.  After a row with her husband, Madame Beudet decides she can endure this life no longer.  Whilst he is out at the theatre, she loads her husband's gun with bullets, knowing that the next time he performs his stunt he will kill himself.  After a sleepless night she has a change of heart, but before she can remove the bullets from the gun her husband gets there first.  As he chastises his wife for her poor housekeeping, Monsieur Beudet picks up the gun, aims it at her and, not knowing it is loaded, pulls the trigger...